


Trespass Sweetly Urged

by Thistlerose



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:38:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginny follows the butterfly.  (Written in 2004.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trespass Sweetly Urged

Luna got a tattoo over the summer. Ginny spotted it in History of Magic, where she was seated behind the other girl. Luna tilted her head slightly to the left, as though she’d heard something that no one else had, her fine blonde hair slid away from her neck, and Ginny saw the tattoo.

It was a butterfly, with a wingspan about the length of Ginny’s thumb. It was a dusty, faded purple, like the clouds after a storm. Its antennae were long and black at the tips, and looked as though they ought to tickle. Professor Binns was droning on about some goblin uprising, so Ginny moved her quill over her parchment as though she were writing, but she kept her gaze on Luna’s butterfly tattoo.

As she watched it fluttered down the other girl’s neck and disappeared under the collar of her robes. It reappeared a few minutes later on the back of Luna’s hand. Luna noticed, turned her hand over, and the butterfly fluttered on the soft skin as though her palm were a flower.

Ginny watched, transfixed, and with her own hand she began to draw butterflies on her parchment.

* * * *

She saw the tattoo again at dinner. It was on Luna’s cheek, half-hidden by her long, uncombed hair. Ginny sat at the Gryffindor table and watched the pale purple wingtips shiver and beat.

“Did someone hit her?” asked Ron, his long, blunt fingers curling angrily around the table’s edge.

Ginny supposed it did look a bruise from that distance.

“No, I think it’s a flower,” Hermione said, reaching for the shepherd’s pie. “Tucked behind her ear.”

But Ginny knew.

* * * *

Ginny found Luna in the library after dinner. She hadn’t been looking for the other girl. She’d simply gone to get a book she needed for her Transfiguration essay, taken it to the table by the window, and found Luna there.

Luna looked up when she approached, and smiled vaguely. The butterfly was nowhere to be seen.

“Mind if I join you?” Ginny asked. She’d never asked Luna if she could study with her before, but the other girl did not seem surprised.

“Of course,” she said. Then she added, as Ginny sank into a chair, “Did you know that Dai Llewelyn’s death wasn’t an accident?”

“Dangerous Dai Llewelyn?” asked Ginny, frowning. “From the Caerphilly Catapults? He was eaten by a manticore, in Greece.”

“Yes,” said Luna impatiently. “But who sent the manticore after him? Everyone knows he was having an affair with the wife of the Head of Magical Law Enforcement.” She tapped her chin with her quill and raised her pale eyebrows.

“ _I_ didn’t know,” said Ginny bluntly. “Anyway, he was kind of a daredevil. He got too close to a sleeping manticore, and it woke up and ate him. That’s what everyone knows.”

“That’s what everyone _thinks_ ,” said Luna dreamily.

A thin shaft of moonlight spilled through the window. There was plenty of artificial light in the library, but the moonlight seemed to curve around it, to fall only onto Luna. It gave her skin a faintly silver glow and made her hair appear pale as seaspray.

“Want to see something?” she said suddenly, and held her hand out to Ginny with the palm up and the fingers slightly curled. In her hand the butterfly rested as though it had alighted upon a flower, the faded violet wings opening and closing slowly. Ginny could see the lines of the other girl’s palm through the butterfly’s wings.

“I got it in Switzerland this summer,” she continued breathily. “Isn’t it nice? It started out as an egg, of course. That was easy to hide from my dad. I kept it right here,” she said, touching the spot where her neck and shoulder met, “and no one ever saw. It was a little harder when it was a caterpillar. But caterpillars move slowly, so I was able to run and hide when I saw it crawling onto my hand. The chrysalis was easy again. Then it hatched just two nights ago.”

“Doesn’t anyone care?” Ginny asked, mesmerized by the butterfly’s quivering wings. She did not look up, but she knew Luna shrugged.

“Isn’t it nice?” the other girl asked again. Her voice was pitched very low, but Ginny had a feeling she was less afraid of alerting Madam Pince than she was of disturbing the butterfly. Ginny herself hardly dared to breathe, lest her breath blow the little creature away. Something about it bothered her, though.

“But, if it goes through the whole cycle, from egg to butterfly…does that mean it’s going to die?”

“Well, yes,” said Luna calmly. “Not _die_ exactly, since it’s not alive. The tattoo artist said it would start to become tattered in a few days after it hatched, and then it would just fade away. There won’t be any trace of it by next week, probably.”

Luna did not move, but Ginny wanted to place her own hand over the other girl’s palm, to shelter the butterfly from the harsh artificial light of the library, and the crisp autumn air that the castle’s massive stones did not keep out.

“Watch,” Luna instructed. The butterfly’s wings fluttered, and Ginny had a sudden urge to ask the other girl if it tickled. She did not speak, however, as the butterfly began to move over Luna’s wrist and up her arm, following the blue veins like rivers. Luna rolled her sleeve back as far as she could until the butterfly disappeared under the bunched up fabric just above her elbow.

Ginny stared, mesmerized, at the pale skin where the butterfly had last been. She imagined she saw a trail of dust from the butterfly’s wings, glittering like ground up amethysts.

“Where is it now?” she asked, her mouth dry. She began to lick her lips, to moisten them; then she noticed the tip of Luna’s tongue poking out from between her thin lips. “Where is it now?” she asked again. Her voice seemed to shiver in the crisp air like the butterfly’s wings.

“I don’t know,” Luna said, her lips unfolding in a smile that sent shivers racing up Ginny’s arms, and suddenly she was quite sure of where the butterfly had gone.

“Want to look for it?” Luna asked. “My room is empty right now.”

The way she said it, it didn’t sound at all mad.

* * * *

Luna spread her legs with a butterfly’s careless grace. Her knickers were petal pink, which amused Ginny, because she had never thought of Luna as a pink girl. At least there were no rosettes, or lace. Luna’s hair was spread around her on the pillow like a crazy halo. It clung to her neck, and to Ginny’s fingers and wrist when she leaned over to brush it back.

As she was leaning over her, Luna reached up and cupped Ginny’s breast through her cotton bra. She smiled up at Ginny, and Ginny smiled back, a little inanely. Dean Thomas had touched her breasts, and once, so had Katie Bell. Luna’s touch was different from either of theirs. There was something casual about it, but reverent, too. _This is nice_ , her gaze seemed to say. _This should be as commonplace as flowers, and just as special._

The butterfly had alighted on Luna’s left shoulder. Ginny lowered her head to it and kissed it, half-expecting to feel the fragile wings beating against her lips. Instead she felt the soft, cool, smoothness of Luna’s skin and the other girl’s heart beating as quickly as those wings. Luna’s fingers stroked Ginny’s breast, found the nipple, and circled it until it hardened and Ginny gasped.

As though the butterfly had felt her sharp inhalation, it moved from Luna’s shoulder, across her collarbone, down over her chest to settle between her breasts. Ginny looked at it, then looked up at Luna who was watching her curiously and twirling a few strands of pale hair with her index finger.

The autumn wind had picked up, and was rattling the castle’s turrets. It was so quiet in the bedroom that Ginny thought she could hear the wind sighing through the trees of the Forbidden Forest, far away.

Neither the wind nor the chilly air touched her, though. The castle walls were sturdy, and the deep green curtains that surrounded Luna’s bed were thick. The torches in the bedroom made the curtains glow from without.

As she leaned down again to kiss the butterfly, and to explore with her fingertips the soft mounds of Luna’s breasts, she wondered where this was going to go. She and the other girl had barely spoken since they had left the library. Strangely, Ginny found herself thinking about Ron and her other friends, whom she had last seen at dinner, which seemed to have taken place centuries before she had ever considered kissing Luna.

 _They don’t know,_ she thought, and then wondered what it was she knew that they did not. Whatever it was, it made her shiver, made her want to wriggle inside Luna as though the other girl were her chrysalis.

The butterfly floated downward, as Ginny had half-known it would. It disappeared under the elastic of Luna’s panties. Luna could not possibly feel the butterfly; it was only ink, after all. Nevertheless, she stretched her legs on the mattress and tossed her hair.

 _Change is inevitable_ , Ginny decided. She lowered her lips to follow the butterfly, and gave herself over to the thrill of becoming something new.

10/08/04


End file.
